How to Delegate Without Losing Control of Your Cleaning Business

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Introduction

Stephanie: Hello everyone, welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie from Serene Clean, and in today’s episode we are going to be talking about delegation as well as just operational changes that occur in the life of your business when it comes to you as the owner taking care of pretty much everything, and what that can look like at different parts of the business. I also just want to share that it is not a one size fits all approach when it comes to delegation, and I want to describe my own relationship with delegation as I’ve added administrative labor in the office at Serene Clean, and what that doesn’t look like and evolved over time. I think that there is a lot of maybe misconceptions or thinking that it needs to be all or nothing when it comes to office staff.

The first thing that I want to tell you is that you do not need to have a full time office person. That doesn’t need to be the first administrative hire that you have when you’re ready to hire, when you’re ready to start putting somebody into the office to help assist with all of that. It does not, and honestly I don’t think it should be a full time job necessarily. This is just based off of my own experience in Serene Clean. I feel it worked very well with all of my managers that they all started as cleaners.

You know how I feel about that. If you are a regular listener, I think that that’s a huge advantage to having your administrative staff be able to clean so that they can help create that buffer between you, owner, and the field. When somebody calls out, it’s not just you that can clean. Office managers can also clean. Of course, if we’re talking about virtual assistants or anybody who’s not physically in the location of your business, that’s irrelevant, that doesn’t help you at all when it comes to call outs and things like that. So we’re talking about in person administrative staff.

Say we do have somebody who’s in person but they don’t know how to clean, nor have they been expected or trained to clean. Well then, who is going to clean when somebody gets called out? I think personally that the best practice, if you are going to have in office staff, they should at least know how to clean and know that it is part of their job that they may get pulled into the field. Of course, that is not the goal. It is not the goal that that is happening often, but shit happens. Or somebody quits and we need to cover, or it just makes sense from a scheduling perspective that we go take care of a vacation rental or something so that we can have our regular cleaners on perhaps a regular client or something like that. We will definitely make that decision even up to this day, six years in. My managers still can and will go clean six years in. If I am in Wisconsin, I can and will go clean.

All of that to be said, I think it’s valuable. I think it is a wonderful thing. I talked about this I believe in last week’s episode from a cultural perspective. It’s really good if your management team can clean. It shows a lot of respect I think to the cleaning techs if they see that you guys are willing to do that.

Starting with Administrative Help

That is first and foremost. Before we get into any of the details of administrative labor, I think that everybody should be trained as a cleaner. It can be done, of course, without that occurring, especially if you’re running independent contractors or you have virtual administrative help. Well then of course you are the buffer then, or you have to come up with some other type of solution. That’s what I like about it. If the goal as the owner, you, whoever’s listening, I’m assuming you’re the owner, you might also be a manager. But if the goal is for you to get out of the field and to distance yourself from having to get pulled back in, well who’s going to be the buffer?

We can also have fill in people. We can have somebody who you just build on call availability into their schedule, but they’re most likely going to be doing administrative labor or quality checks or something that isn’t cleaning so that if they don’t get called in, they’re still being useful to the business. All of this caveat to be said, I believe that that should be how we approach administrative staff. I know a lot of people don’t, and that’s fine. This is just my own personal experience and what I would suggest to make it easier to distance you guys from the field when things go wrong.

The Transition Process

If we go back to Serene Clean’s history, as you guys know I started as the everything. I was cleaning, I was doing all administrative tasks. There was zero other person. I was wearing every single hat of the entire business, and that obviously places a lot of areas. A lot of you guys are in the same exact boat, and that is a painful place to be in, especially before you can afford anybody administratively.

But one thing I want to challenge you on is that concept of being able to afford an administrative person. If we go back to what I previously said, if we have somebody who can clean and we are transitioning them into the office, this does not need to be all cleaning one week and then all office work the next week. Actually, I would highly recommend you don’t do that, and most likely it simply can’t happen anyway. If we look at any of my managers, I would suggest you guys go re-listen to those episodes that I interviewed each of my managers, Katie, April and Crystal. We talked about what this looked like, this process looked like. They all started as cleaners, and once we’re like yes, we want you in the office, it’s not like boom, they’re in the office the next day or the next week. This was a long, painful transitionary process for us to get them to full time admin labor, and that simply was just the reality of the situation with the schedule.

The goal was to do that, sure we wanted them to be in the office, but they had regular clients or we had people calling in, we had people quitting, and so it’s like no, you need to go clean. We can’t get you in the office today. We may have had a whole week where we’re like, finally yes, she’s going to be in the office all week. We can train and focus on it, and then oh, we’re all cleaning again. That’s just the reality of what it looked like. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t this perfect laid out plan. I didn’t have any training material for them or anything like that. It was not pretty, it was not polished. Frankly, it was kind of chaotic, but that was the nature of the business at that time.

What makes them fantastic managers is that they are very good at dealing with chaos. That just showed that they were able to roll with the punches and take on challenges as they came on. They knew, because I made it very clear, you’re still going to be cleaning somewhat. Make sure that you have that expectation set in place so that they are not getting disappointed or frustrated more so than is appropriate considering the situation that they’re going to be cleaning sometimes. That’s just the way it is because of the type of work that we do.

Starting Part-Time Administrative Work

Do not aim for them to be full time admin, and frankly, again coming back to the affordability or being able to afford administrative labor, it really is a math thing. Say let’s run an example here. Say you have a full time cleaner and you’re like, I want them in the office. They’re going to be great for admin. Maybe they have experience or they’ve expressed this interest, and you’re both feeling the vibe of this. That’s exactly what it was like for Crystal, Katie and April. They started as cleaners. I could clearly tell just by spending time with them that they have the capacity to be really excellent in other roles potentially.

If you’re getting that feeling and you have a full time cleaner, what I would suggest is let’s try to get them in the office for 10 hours a week consistently. Can we get 10 hours of time a week freed up from them, put it on other cleaners? Because we’re going to have to delegate their cleaning work to somebody else. You’re going to have to hand it off to somebody else. Can we do that so that we can consistently have them in the office for 10 hours a week? Because they are still bringing in 30 hours ish, not counting travel, whatever. They’re bringing around 30 hours of revenue in. We’re making money off of them. We’re only having to cover 10 hours of overhead expenses associated with them. That is a lot more reasonable for you than trying to cover 40 hours.

Also, just from a training perspective and knowing what to have them do, it’s a lot of pressure to have them take on all of this stuff. So it’s really nice when you’re transitioning them into the office to just delegate very specific things. You’re not trying to teach them how to do everything in the office. They’re going to take on one responsibility off of you, or they’re going to help you in an area that maybe we’re tag teaming this thing. Then as time goes on, we start training them on all different areas, and it becomes not overwhelming to them, which is great. But it’s also not overwhelming to you from a training perspective.

Sitting down and showing somebody how to do something in the office, whether that be in the software or especially if you don’t have a lot of processes put together, this takes off that pressure from you to have everything perfectly assembled. You guys know we use the software Trainual now for a lot of our standard operating procedure SOP documentation, as well as our onboarding of staff, and just really anything to do with scaling and documenting processes. We do that in Trainual. You can also do it in Loom.

Did I have all that shit together when I started? Absolutely not. When Crystal came into the office, because she was the first manager, she came in and she was like, is this seriously how it’s going? I mean I had some processes, but I was losing my freaking mind. It was a total mess. Luckily, because of her brain, she could come in and help organize the process of like wait, this is going to be a more efficient way. That’s really what we’re looking for in a manager, somebody who not only can do what they’re told and follow something correctly and efficiently, they’re also somebody who can look at something and say there’s probably a better way. Let me fix this. You’re giving them that empowerment to say yes, I want you to help me fix this. I want you to make this the most efficient way, and really giving them that responsibility and trust.

Proving Themselves and Avoiding Overwhelm

If we just give them 10 hours, they can prove themselves there. If you just take all of their cleanings off of them, or maybe you just hire them outright as a full time office manager, let’s say they weren’t a cleaner. Let’s say you’re just hiring an admin person and you hire them for 40 hours a week, you’re probably going to be disappointed. But it’s because you haven’t set them up for success, because having enough work for them, it’s not that there’s not enough to do. There’s always so much to do, but you may not even know what that looks like frankly, depending on what kind of size you are at. That can become really just overwhelming and an unsuccessful hire potentially.

Whereas if we just start them off at part time admin labor and then they’re covering the on call or maybe they keep a couple regular clients until they have enough administrative labor on a regular basis and they’ve got that down, okay now let’s start taking off more clients of theirs and transitioning them further until finally they are full time. This eases the financial burden for you guys. This is a much more appropriate way to handle this than boom, 40 hours of admin labor. For most of you, it’s just not going to make sense financially, and they’re going to be sitting there and you’re going to get pissed off because you haven’t set them up for enough to do. Honestly, they may not be good at all of the administrative tasks, or they may not be suited for all of them.

For us, I brought Crystal in and she started kind of helping me tackle certain areas of different things. Then we brought April in and she started, we all kind of tackled all of it together. But very quickly as time went on, we realized that they each had their proficiencies and what they were good at, and we started kind of dividing and delegating amongst us as a management team. A lot of the first stuff that Crystal helped me with was the scheduling, was emailing and contact back and forth. She never did payroll. I think she might have helped with billing. I’d have to go back to her episode and listen, so I would recommend you guys go back and listen to those.

It wasn’t this all or nothing thing. It was very slow transition for sure. So I know I’m just beating this dead horse, but I’m just trying to make it clear to you guys, it doesn’t have to be boom, full time admin person. Same with a virtual assistant, same concepts apply. I had Crystal come in, she started helping with those things. Then when April came in, she started helping with calculating payroll because there was just a lot of manual calculation that was occurring. This is before we realized that we could run a report in ZenMaid and that would help. This is also before we had Gusto payroll software, which made things a lot easier.

Calculating payroll took hours and hours a week as we continued to grow and tracking all the tips and all of the mileage. That is something that April took over. However, I still ran the final payroll. She would enter all the numbers in and I would review and approve it. A lot of the processes were kind of like this where they would take chunks of it and then I would have the final touch point until I had seen, you know, over that time and consistently. It wasn’t because I didn’t trust them, it was more so I just wanted to make sure and still had that final say and control on things.

The Reality of Daily Operations

They also helped with things like quality control in the beginning, but it was just very haphazard. It was like, what do we need to tackle today, what are the, as I call them, burning fires. No matter what to this day, we are always going to handle the burning fires first. I want to run through kind of a typical day for Serene Clean. It just depends on the staff member, of course, meaning the administrative person now that we have our roles kind of split up. However, this is going to be the typical operations of the business.

First and foremost, we’re going to deal with burning fires. There are only a few things that qualify as a burning fire in my mind in a cleaning business. The first thing is going to be employees calling out or quitting. That’s going to be number one burning fire that we need to address immediately. We need to rearrange the schedule and see what our options are. We are immediately in ZenMaid, we’re looking at what we have available. Who can we push? Who could we cancel on if we need to? What can we do? Who could we pull from one cleaning and short another client? This is literally what’s happening every single day, and that’s not something that you can automate because you never know what each day is going to bring to you from a call out perspective.

The other burning fire is going to be customers canceling for service that day. Depending on where you’re at, this could be a huge burning fire because you may have multiple cleaners out. This is why we need to have a cancelation policy. However, if the client is sick, it’s not really something we want to punish them for. If their children are sick, unless this is a reoccurring problem, then they can have a couple shots at that, and then we still have to charge them the cancelation fee. That cancelation fee, when we do charge it, it’s going to be 50% of the service, and we are going to pay the cleaner for the time if it was that last minute same day cancelation and we can’t get that cleaner any other work. We are going to pay them for the time that they were approved for at the cleaning. That is what that cancelation fee is for. It is to cover that labor so their income is not affected.

That’s exactly what we explain to the client when we charge it because if they are okay with their cleaners income being affected negatively, especially if they’re canceling for no good reason, they’re a jackass client. They don’t give a shit about your cleaners, and that’s really, really inconsiderate and disrespectful. I do take that very seriously, and I want to make sure that our staff’s income is as regular as possible because it’s not their fault that a client canceled.

The ideal situation is that we are going to be able to get them on another job. If somebody else wants off, we’ll throw that out there. If anybody wants off earlier today so that the people who want to be working are working. If somebody, you know, yeah I’d love to get off, my kids got a baseball game and I wanted to travel to that or whatever. Keep that in mind, you can always get creative with that type of thing.

Then finally, the other burning fire is going to be complaints. We want to get to the bottom of a complaint. We want to address that as quickly as possible. Those are the things that we are tackling right away every single morning. That is the first line of defense and the things that we are tackling. That’s going to also look like communicating with cleaners, letting them know that we’re rearranging the schedule or that changes are occurring, refreshers and may go look and make sure that you know where you’re supposed to be going and you’re going to have the tools that you’re going to need.

We try to let everybody know whose schedule is changing as quickly as possible, which is why it’s so important that our cleaners are communicating. They don’t just say I don’t feel well, they tell us I’m going to be out. That’s very important that we have that effective communication. So not trying to go on a tangent here, but that is going to be the typical beginning of every single day at Serene Clean and everybody’s businesses. You guys know that because you might get pulled in and have to clean, and that sucks because it’s like you had this whole day planned out and now you got to clean and it just blows. But that is the nature of when we are smaller and just starting out, or even years into it, it still will happen occasionally where our managers have to go clean.

Sales and Follow-Up Process

The next area is kind of the follow up process and sales and leads, and this is where it splits off depending on which manager. But if you guys are just looking holistically at what’s important in the business, of course keeping that sales funnel strong and dedicating time to that every single day when it comes to follow up, when we’re getting out the estimate request. Say you had four estimate requests come in yesterday or over the weekend. We want to get those out as quickly as possible, whether that means you’re calling them, setting up a walkthrough if you do walkthroughs. We do not. We are sending estimates out completely over the email.

This is an area, I think we kind of shared this and we all tackled this pretty equally, but it quickly became clear that it’s ideal if one person kind of owns that. If you can teach your administrative person to do that, that is an area that you could certainly delegate early on. But just make sure that you have good processes in place. I think a lot of people drop the ball specifically with follow up when it comes to their administrative staff, or that sales are not very good. I think with my conversation with Sean Perry, we kind of talked about that, that nobody is typically as good at sales as the owner is. That is something that we just have to grapple with.

There are certain things that we can put into place to reduce the effects of that, things like call scripts. Record your damn call so you can listen and hear, is it the tone? Are they smiling while they talk? Because you can hear that through the phone. Are they dealing with objections correctly? These are all areas you may be like Stephanie, I’m not good at this, and I understand that. But there are things that we can do to become better at sales. Sales is simply a practice, and I highly recommend a call script and using email templates so that you have consistency across all the lead management.

When we are controlling and changing variables, we can adjust things one at a time and see if that has a different effect. Throughout the sales process, that follow up is so important, and this is something that I think is a great area for you to delegate to a team member. But you need to not just say yeah, follow up on the leads. We have to give them more guidance than that. What does that look like?

Again, we’re big fans of email templates, of text templates, so that everything is controlled. So that when we want to adjust something, it’s not all willy nilly. When the follow up in the way that we communicate with clients is all over the place and it’s just dependent on how we’re speaking that day or how we’re feeling that day, you can’t know what the problem is necessarily other than lack of consistency. That’s a huge problem. But if we can tell when we’re listening to the calls, oh there they all seem to hesitate, okay what’s that? Now we can start addressing that.

I know you guys are like how do I do all these things? ChatGPT is your best friend. Even literally, you can talk back and forth and say you are a world class sales trainer or sales coach, I am terrible at sales, can you help me do some practice calls back and forth? Literally, you can role play with ChatGPT. Just prompt it that it’s an excellent sales coach, it’s a top seller of whatever. I want you to go back and forth with me and practice customer calls and just you verbalizing that and practicing it. That’s exactly what I did. I had my managers practice their call scripts.

I also incentivized them when we were still answering the phones that if they close somebody on the phone, they got 20 bucks. Every time they close somebody on the phone, you can absolutely do some type of commission because nobody wants to answer the phone. What makes you really excited is that at the end of that phone call is maybe an additional $20 for whatever 15 minutes of work that they were already supposed to be doing anyway. How can we make people excited to do something that they’re not excited to do, and you just closed, or potentially, you know, a regular client that’s going to be thousands of dollars a year, well worth that $20.

Think about the objections, not both from the client perspective but from the employee perspective to make them want to do this. They were very happy to do that and they tracked all of that and whatnot. We’ve gotten away from that now just because closing is so variable and we do everything over email. But this is a good example.

I know I’m putting little tidbits on each of these steps, but that is an area that you certainly can delegate for sure, anything to do with sales and estimating. I know a lot, and honestly I would say you guys should hold on to this at least. If you’re doing commercial especially, I would say you should still be doing the walkthroughs for a time. It should be a while before you’re able to hand that off effectively. But the follow up process for sure can happen, sending out the estimates can happen, and the phone calls can happen. But we can’t just say answer the phones and then that’s it. We have to help them with that.

There’s ways that we can train you guys. I love the book The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. I think that that’s an excellent resource when it comes to not only sales but just how to view sales and how to behave with them. That would be a good one for a manager to listen to as well.

We are going to follow up on any first time cleans that were completed later in the previous day as well. We want to see how that went. We never want to send a bill before we hear how the first time clean went, or we try to prevent that as much as possible. Because if the first time cleans didn’t go well and then we send a bill, it’s just going to infuriate them more when maybe we could have mitigated the problem. Say yes, let’s go do that touch up clean if we have to on first time cleans, because as you guys know I call first time cleans our Super Bowl. We really want to nail those because that’s the make or break of are we going to turn this into reoccurring revenue or not, because one off revenue is great but that should be the icing on the cake. We want that juicy reoccurring revenue, which is easier said than done.

We want to follow up. Say we got done with the cleaning late yesterday, it was five, 5:30, and we don’t want to send the bill, but we do want to send the follow up email at the end of the night or right away in the morning to make sure that they have an opportunity to voice any issues and that we can fix it very quickly before we send the bill. Then we’re going to want to book them for reoccurring if possible. That’s obviously the goal.

Lead Management Systems

We’re going to want to follow up on any estimates we sent the day before or two days before. We do all of this in ClickUp when it comes to managing the lead process. If that’s something that you guys are interested in, my manager Katie is taking on folks for setting up ClickUp, meaning she can walk through our ClickUp lead management process and you guys can literally set up your own along the way, screen sharing, all that good stuff. We got a bunch of automations if you want to go the ClickUp lead management route. I know a lot of people use Go High Level. That’s great. We’ve built out ClickUp to suit our needs and it’s very, very robust.

If you’re interested in that, you can always shoot me an email, stephanie@sereneclean.com and I can get you hooked up with Katie because she is the one who manages all of the leads now at Serene Clean and is very into ClickUp every day. When it comes to doing all this follow up and stuff, this is literally tasks that are automatically being created for her so she can just filter and see what follow ups need to be happening. Or my executive assistant Veronica, she handles a lot of the follow up too. Katie’s delegated to Veronica now a lot of this follow up process, which is really, really cool and shows that something is systematic when you can hand it off to somebody else and there’s no lack of quality in that process. There’s no drop in how it’s being executed. That’s the ideal systematic situation, that we can bring somebody in here, you go watch these videos, these are the systems you need to be in, meaning the software is, boom you’re good. That is the ideal. It takes a little bit to get there, but that is where we are at now.

We’re going to then send any residential estimates out that were requested overnight, send any commercial bids that were due from completed walkthroughs. As you can see, sales, that is a huge aspect. We want to get to that because obviously cash is king. We don’t have money, we’re going to die as business owners. This is why we want to focus so heavily. Do not let this get away from you. You don’t want to be sending an estimate from somebody who reached out days ago. This should be a huge priority.

Once you get through your burning fires and once you get back to anything that’s really, really urgent, meaning same day appointment stuff that needs to be added, maybe the emails that you need to add notes to the ZenMaid notes in, or something like that, we’re going to handle that kind of client communication. But then we’re going to get to sales, we’re going to get to follow up, and that’s every single day. You should be nose to the grind in that. This should be a huge priority of what needs to get done.

Billing and Invoicing

Then we are also going to get into invoicing and charging cards. We kind of do this midday, so after the first kind of round of cleanings for the day and then the end of day. Billing and invoicing is an area that I think I delegated pretty quickly, or we tackled it as a group. But this is something that April took on pretty early on. We would kind of say hey, you get to it today or I’ll get to it today, and we kind of tag teamed that responsibility.

This could be an area where you feel a little bit uneasy to delegate necessarily. I can understand that. But if you feel like you can’t trust them to do this, they shouldn’t be in the office at all. They shouldn’t have any access to anything at all if you do not feel like you can trust them with this. This is a trust but verify. Truly, all areas of delegation are trust but verify on a regular basis, and that can be less frequent as time goes on and you’ve seen their work and they’ve been consistent and they’ve shown that they are trustworthy. But early on, we want to be really looking into what people are doing.

I think that that’s a misconception, that once you hands off a task or responsibility to an administrative person, it’s off of your chest forever. That’s asking for trouble, whether that be innocent or nefarious. Trouble could go either way. Most likely it’s going to be innocent. What do I mean by that? It means that they are going to make mistakes. They may not be realizing that they’re making mistakes, and they may not be asking you for the feedback.

Just make sure that you make them aware. Hey, I’m going to be checking your work. I just want to make sure that you’re not having any issues and seeing what comes up, because a lot of times we explain something and we don’t realize that we’re missing a step or something along those lines and you want to tweak that. Do be sure to check in on any process that you delegate. Go ahead and check in on every aspect of that fairly regularly until they’ve proven that they consistently can do this thing correctly and the way that you want it to be done.

We’re going to do that twice a day, so midday and then end of day. April’s taking care of the invoicing and charging of the cards. Then the remaining tasks of the office can be completed at any time of day, and it may not be a daily task, and it’s completed by the appropriate person that it is delegated to.

Delegating Payroll and Hiring

Calculating and running payroll before it’s due. For us, this is due by the end of day on Thursday to pay staff each Friday. Again, we use Gusto for that, and that is something that April did. For me, delegating payroll was one of the first areas that I completed. I hated it, fucking hated it guys. I didn’t like calculating it. It was very monotonous. That is an area, even though I still did that final submit button, she was doing 99% of it from a very early point on in April’s time in the office.

When it comes to what to delegate first, what do you hate the most, and that’s what the goal should be. You should still be able to do it. You should still be able to do it because you got to be able to check their work. But the relief, the mental relief that that’s going to give you as the owner, because you are running around like a chicken with his head cut off, that’s what you’re doing. That’s what I was doing. If you’re not, you lucky duck. I was headless chicken running around, and all of a sudden me being able to hand off payroll, of course Crystal was already in there helping with all of these other things too. But handing off payroll, something I really fucking hated, that was like I can breathe a little. I can breathe a little, still headless, still running around, but I can breathe a bit.

Whatever that thing is for you in the business, what do you hate the most? What do you not like to do? What do you struggle with getting done consistently? That should be the thing that you’re looking at to delegate. That’s kind of how I approached it until all that remains eventually is the things that you truly enjoy and want to do, or the things that only you can do. The goal in my opinion for all of us, owners and CEOs, is to only do the things that one, you enjoy, or two, that you are the only person that can be doing it. Honestly, I’ve even delegated things that I’ve enjoyed because it’s kind of monotonous and it’s not the best use of my time. Now it’s like okay, only I can do this, or I’d have to pay somebody more than I want to necessarily to do this thing.

Hiring activities, so responding to applicants, following up after interviews, reposting job listings or creating new ones, posting in local Facebook groups, anything to do with hiring and then running group interviews or setting up interviews. Now, of course, Crystal is the head of HR. She completely owns this process 100%. I haven’t touched this in years. However, that is something that she was able to run the group interview and help with that. We kind of tag teamed interviewing and she was managing a lot of that process from early on. That was another area where I was really overwhelmed in, just keeping the hiring funnel going.

This could be an area very, I would say, easy to show how to do this. This is how we do job listings, this is how you should be responding to applicants, that type of thing. This could be an easy area for you to delegate as well.

Other Administrative Tasks

The next area is going to be supply and inventory management, printing off checklists, doing laundry, kind of all of that stuff needs to be done. Again, this could all be tackled with both of you, but these are things that could be handed off to somebody else. Supply and inventory management, that’s going to be all on April right now. Printing off checklist really could be any of them, but I think Katie is the one who kind of handles that. Then doing laundry, anybody in the office is expected to just keep the laundry going, including our cleaning tech. That’s kind of the literal physical manifestations of things in the office that need to be handled as the business that could be done. I would say supply and inventory management, you guys can absolutely have cleaners help you do that.

I know I did an entire episode on supply and inventory management and how we do that. If we can remember to link that down below, Nicole, hey Nicole, go do that right now if I call you up, maybe you’ll link the supply and inventory management episode that we did a few months back. If you guys want to specifically see how we handle that with our cleaning techs helping with that, that may be very useful to you.

Next area is going to be bookkeeping tasks. So paying credit cards, any late payments from commercial accounts, following up on this. I see that as separately from invoicing and charging cards because now this is bookkeeping. This could be an area you guys delegate very early on, and you could delegate this right outside the business and get yourself a bookkeeper. I still think you should know how to bookkeep 100% so you can check and again that trust but verify so that things are being done correctly.

I know that nobody likes the bookkeeping. I understand, but I do think that it is important we know what’s going on so that we can understand our business finances. I still review all of the books at the end of the month. Actually on a monthly basis, I go through and just I’m comparing the expenses from the previous month. I’m not actually doing the manual entry of any of the transactions, but I am approving them. I guess I still do hold on to some of the bookkeeping responsibilities because we have QuickBooks Online. What that does is it connects to our bank account and it’s bringing in the transactions from all of our accounts, and then I am just adding those into the different various categories of expenses.

April is doing some of that. She’s handling all of the credit cards, and I think Crystal used to do that before. We’ve literally passed it between managers to whoever it makes sense. Crystal is now HR, so she’s not going to handle that, but it makes sense now with payroll and accounts receivable and payable, that’s April, so she’s going to do that. This has shifted over the years.

April’s going to handle all of the credit card, anything to do with the credit cards, because we try to put everything on our business credit cards as much as possible so that we can get, we’re paying it off of course every single month, but that way we can get the cash back rewards. We’re already going to be spending that money. It also prevents fraud because if something’s on a credit card, it’s a lot easier to handle a fraud charge as opposed to it pulling directly from a debit card.

Little side note, definitely recommend everybody put things on business credit cards. I know you might be like Stephanie credit cards, yes. If you’re already going to be spending the money, pay the fucking thing off every month. I’m not trying to shame anybody if you can’t do that yet, but that is the ultimate goal, that we’re going to be paying this off every single month and we’re just getting rewarded for spending money that we would already spend and protecting ourselves from fraud.

She’s going to do that, but I still am looking through the books. I am adding things that are pulling automatically from the bank account potentially, and then I am reviewing all of the expenses each month, looking at what categories went up, went down, why, making sure everything is categorized correctly. Then our accountant is also reviewing all of that as well and making sure that things are technically categorized correctly from a tax perspective. But this could be an area that you guys 100% delegate, but do be checking.

Marketing and Branding

Marketing and branding activities. This is creating and scheduling out social media posts, working on the website, cold calling and emailing. That’s kind of sales, but yeah I would say that sales activities, asking for reviews, adding content to Google My Business, seeking out networking events, brainstorming new ideas, for example cleaning giveaways, Adopt a Highway, joining Cleaning for a Reason, free cleaning name nomination program, all of these different things that we can do as a promotional activity for the business and building the brand. I would also say that this kind of falls into managing employee relations, but we’ll talk about that a little bit in the culture section.

I have held on to a lot of the marketing. My degree is in marketing. I enjoy the marketing and branding aspects of the business. I feel like I’m pretty adept at it. It’s always just what I’ve been drawn to. However, there are certain aspects of it that I do not handle anymore. I’ve now delegated that to Veronica, my executive assistant. For example, a lot of, pretty much all of the social media posts, except a few, either Veronica or Crystal is handling it. Working on the website, that could be me or Veronica. Adding content to Google My Business, it could be several of us depending on what type of content it is. Whoever is making the content, for example a welcome post on social media for a new staff member, that’s going to be Crystal because she’s HR, so Crystal is actually going to put that on Google My Business. Whereas I do all the anniversary posts for the employees, so I put that on Google My Business. It’s not again blanket, everything is on one person. It just depends on what the task is and what makes the most sense.

Going to networking events, I think that that still is a great thing for you to be doing because you are the face of your business. But if you do have a trusted administrative person, for example I would absolutely have Katie go to business after five or BNI meetings. I would have no issues with that at all if we wanted to do those types of networking events. But I do think that for the time being, especially if you’re smaller just starting out, I think it’s a great idea for you to get foot on pavement. Let’s go, let’s network. I think it’s a great thing because you’re going to be the most passionate and you’re going to be able to really set the tone the best I think when it comes to that type of thing.

There’s a lot of areas in this particular category that you could delegate again. Before and after graphics, once we figure out how we want that done, as I talked about in a couple episodes back of standing out online, a lot of the things that we can do, we can actually delegate to an administrative person. It’s actually been fairly recent in the past year that I’ve delegated most of this. Up until last year, I was still handling a ton of this stuff.

Employee Interactions and Tracking

The next area is going to be just formal and informal employee interactions. This could be a performance review, this could be taking them out to lunch, messaging back and forth, getting them answers on things, checking in, a hug, training, sending them feedback surveys and sharing that feedback, wishing them happy birthday or happy work anniversary, meetings, meetings with them about a complaint potentially. There’s so many different types of things that happen when it comes to employee interactions. Really, depending on what it is, it could be any of my managers, but it’s most likely not going to be me.

This is an area that, until I moved, was something that I participated in more. Well no, really even before that. Before our Fort McCoy job, this stuff I was much more involved with. But once we got that big Fort McCoy job and I was not in the business every day, meaning in the office every day seeing my employees in that manner, this was something I was more heavily involved with. But then once we got that Fort McCoy job and I was away from the office, this was really on my managers. They took that on and they’ve kept it ever since. We have an HR person, Crystal. We have processes in place to handle all of these different areas of what that’s going to look like. We have text templates and the expectation of what is the correct way to communicate about things.

This could be something that you and your admin person both tackle. Honestly I think you kind of have to, especially as you add more cleaners and cleaning techs, whatever you guys call them, we call them cleaning techs. But as you add more of them, you kind of have to, you’re going to be forced to do this because if you’re in meetings or dealing with sales and things like that and a cleaner needs something, well you got to get that to them quickly. We have to be very responsive to our folks in the field because they need answers. They need answers quickly. I would suggest delegating that, or at least the load is shared I would say amongst all of the admin ideally in that scenario.

Another area that you can delegate or that you should be doing is this needs to get done basically, and we can decide what that looks like, is updating tracking metrics and performing audits and compiling information. This is a great area to have somebody else be doing this. You know how to do it. You record it on Loom and then they take that on. Pretty much actually every single person in the administrative staff of Serene Clean has different responsibilities when it comes to tracking metrics and updating that and compiling information. We all have different areas that we are doing.

I still update our financial tracking every single week. I am the one who’s touching that. That will never be somebody else. That is always going to be on me. I won’t let anybody, no that’s me. But anything to do with human resources tracking, hours out, approved time off, that type of stuff, Crystal is going to be doing that. Katie is going to be handling sales stuff. April is going to do a lot of audits based on production rates and pricing audits. We all have different areas that we touch because KPI tracking can just be very extensive and overwhelming, but have them do a little part of it. That’s a great idea. So that every single week you are to update this spreadsheet and this is where you find that information. We slowly get these processes in place. That can be a great place for you to delegate.

Meetings and Systems

Our weekly team meeting every Monday morning at 8:15 AM, we have our weekly team meeting. I run that. It used to be that Crystal ran it, but then once I moved away we decided it was best that I did because I did it in person. Then once I moved we had it where it was Crystal, but now we’ve kind of shifted back to like this is best coming from me and I run that every single week. However, Veronica is the one who is getting my team meeting agenda prepared. That was a great thing to get delegated off of me because it took quite some time every week and it had to be done before Monday morning.

Veronica is in a different time zone than me, so she’s actually ahead. She can do that Monday morning before we’re even in the office. Then I have it all ready to go and update it, because otherwise, literally every single Monday morning or Sunday night I was having to do this meeting agenda for it to be correct. That was a great thing to get off of me.

Then the weekly manager meeting, we do that on Wednesdays and we all are in person for that or we are all present for that. That’s not really something that you can delegate. But it is a meeting. Then just in general, working on systems and processes, tackling and making things more efficient. This could be something that we’re doing as a team, but then assigning okay, you’re going to do this thing, you’re going to prepare this, or you’re going to work on this project or create this training or whatever. Then we come together and review it.

That’s the operations of Serene Clean, all of the different types of areas. I’m sure I’m missing something, but yeah there’s a lot to be done in it. There’s a reason you guys feel overwhelmed. Running a small business is very overwhelming. But as you can see, they look at all of these areas that we could slowly chip away at and give to somebody else. Again, if you want to go the virtual assistant route, that can work really beautifully, whether that be in America or elsewhere. That can work really, really well. A lot of our guests have virtual assistants who are not in America and it works beautifully for them.

My Current Role and Final Thoughts

I want you to broaden your horizons when it comes to delegation, that it doesn’t need to be all or nothing. It also can be little bite sized pieces. The book Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell, big recommend on that. That one really blew my mind right before I hired Veronica as my executive assistant. Realizing holy shit, something’s got to give. I’m really struggling to keep up with everything, and bringing her on has changed my life.

Now my typical day, I mean I’m just doing so much obviously outside of Serene Clean. A lot of my day is consulting with you guys or it’s a lot of work with ZenMaid, which is awesome. But when it comes to Serene Clean, I’m still running my team meetings. I’m still in my operations meeting every week. I’m still doing a decent amount of the marketing work. I still run the newsletter every single month, so there’s some preparation for that. I’m still doing a lot of the financial tracking and auditing, making sure that everything is as it should. I might be meeting with April and asking her questions or we might be talking about things related to the finances, so I’m still pretty in depth with all of that.

I still do, or I guess Veronica now does a lot of the kind of KPI tracking that I used to do, which is great. There has been just a lot more removal of that type of thing. Then of course just being involved with the employees when it comes to the fun, making sure I’m engaged and present whenever I’m interacting with them. But yeah, I’m not meeting with them on a serious note ever unless it’s, you know, if we’re having a second written warning and we did recently with somebody, we had to come to Jesus meeting with her and I was present virtually. That was very effective because she’s completely turned it around, which is awesome.

Other than that, I’m trying to think of what are my other responsibilities. Yeah, so I’m in QuickBooks every day. That’s going to be something I’m pretty involved with. I’m going to do all of the anniversary posts, which I really enjoy. But yeah, it’s pretty great. I mean I enjoy the marketing and branding, so that’s what I’ve stuck with in large part. I will, I don’t know if I just, I guess I do enjoy the financial side of things and digging into the numbers, or if I want to do a particular audit that I don’t want to put on any of the managers because they’re busy. I also will be involved in project work.

For example, we just kind of revamped our cleaning checklist and we added abbreviation keys, and so we need to do a training module for our cleaners on this new checklist. It also just needs to go into the orientation process in general so that this is going forward how we fill out our checklist. This is explaining it. Katie actually prepped it all in Trainual in writing, but we decided that this information is very visual and we should make videos for it.

I am recording those videos. That is literally the project that I’m working on today. I was working on this morning after my team meeting. I started recording the videos on how to do these cleaning checklists now and what that looks like, what the abbreviations mean, what does it look like for it to be properly done or improperly done, that type of stuff. I’m recording those and getting those added to the Trainual so that our cleaners can go through that training process. That would be an example of a project that I’m going to continue working on, but depending on what the project is, that will determine which manager takes on which actual parts of the work.

I know that this might be a little bit overwhelming. I just want to encourage you about delegation, that it can be done. It does not need to be all on you, but you need to set these people up for success. You can’t just dump a bunch of stuff on them and walk away and expect it to go well. There may be multiple times where I’m meeting with my managers and we have to revamp something because it’s just not working the way we need it to. Me and Katie, when we did sit down and create that ClickUp, we were in it for hours and our brains were piles of mush after it because we were setting up all these automations and everything.

I’ll still be involved in things like that when we’re like we need to dig into this, this needs to be redone. I actually really enjoy that type of thing because I know those types of overhauls, though they can be painstaking, they often lead to explosive improvements over time. I really enjoy when we are able to do that because I know it’s making us a more systematic and scalable company and just an easier to manage company in general. That’s kind of what it’s looking like on a day to day basis.

Yeah guys, I hope that this was helpful to you. I hope it doesn’t overwhelm you. It can be done. Just remember you eat an elephant one bite at a time. Take everything that you’re doing. Can you chop out one little section of it, and can we train somebody to do that? Or can we record Looms of us with our screen explaining how to do it? And again, Buy Back Your Time, go read that book. It’s a really great book. Shout out to Ryan from ZenMaid. He’s the one who recommended it to me, and it really just changed my life because I realized that I don’t need to be doing every single step of everything, every single responsibility, that other people can do it and can probably do it a lot better than me because they’re more organized. However, I do need to set them up for success. That’s what that book really talks about, how to set them up for success. So highly recommend that for you guys.

Let me know, what areas have you delegated so far? What area would you love to get off your back? What part of your business are you like, oh my gosh if somebody else could do this I would be so happy, it would be such a stress relief? Put that in the comments below and I’ll try to get back to you and we can talk about it, what that could look like. Of course guys, go join the ZenMaid mastermind. That would be a great place for us to go back and forth. I’m probably going to be much more likely to get back to you there because it’s just hard to keep up with YouTube comments necessarily.

Please leave, I don’t know, a green heart. I’m wearing this cute little green turtleneck. It’s sweater weather guys, it is sweater weather. So leave me a green heart down below. Hit that like, hit that subscribe. If you’re not subscribed, I would love to have you a subscriber. If you are listening on Spotify or Apple podcasts, please leave us a five star review so other people can interact with us as well as be exposed to our content so we can help more people in our industry learn how to do this damn thing. We’re not all alone. All right guys, I’ll see you in the next episode of Filthy Rich Cleaners. Bye bye.

Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• ZenMaid
• Trainual
• ClickUp
• Gusto
• QuickBooks Online
• ChatGPT
• The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes
• Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell
• Go High Level
• Loom
• Watch the episode with Katie Jenks: Filthy Rich Cleaners – E55: Double Your Bookings with Katie & Stephanie’s Cleaning Funnel Fixes
• Watch the episode with April West: Filthy Rich Cleaners – E51: How One Cleaning Employee Becomes Irreplaceable
• Watch the episode with Crystal Davidson: Filthy Rich Cleaners – E43: How My First Employee Became the Heart of the Cleaning Company
• Watch the episode with Sean Parry: Filthy Rich Cleaners – E85: How to Get Quality Cleaning Leads, with Sean Parry
• Watch the episode about Supply and Inventory Management: Filthy Rich Cleaners – E64: Managing Inventory and Supplies in Your Cleaning Business

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